Garden Of Secrets

One of the great pop culture myths of all time has been busted. This one didn't take a build crew or Adam and Jamie. It took about three lines in a memoir to finally unveil to whom the song "You're So Vain" was ascribed. Carly Simon's tell-all "Boys In The Trees" at last blows the lid off this mystery and after forty-three years, aren't we all amazed to find out that the guy who probably thought the song was about him was (insert drum roll here) Warren Beatty.
What? That was worth waiting for since 1972? I expect that Dick Ebersol, who paid fifty thousand dollars back in 2003 for the private audience with Ms. Simon to have that big secret revealed to only him over a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches washed down with vodka on the rocks. Part of me wants to believe that Carly told Mister Ebersol something different than she just told the world. Kris Kristofferson is now just the guy who wrote "Me and Bobby McGee," a song that was based in part on a Fellini film, but that's for Kris to auction off later. Mick Jagger? He is the business manager for one of the most successful touring bands of all time, and he happened to sing back up on "You're So Vain." It's a tangled web they wove.
David Geffen and James Taylor did not, after all these years, make the cut either, but not from lack of trying. James Taylor did go one better by marrying Carly and even going so far as to buy her a mockingbird. David Geffen, while being a good little shopper himself, his vanity was never really in question. At least not from Ms. Simon.
Which brings us back to Warren. In 1972, there was probably no more likely suspect for any such romantic hookup song. I am pretty sure that Mister Beatty figures prominently in a great many of the "somebody done somebody wrong songs" from that period. It's a little known fact that Warren Beatty is one of the recurring figures in Don McClean's "American Pie." Something about McGovern and so forth. That's part of the reason it turns out to be such a disappointment: People had been guessing it was Warren Beatty for years, and now suddenly it becomes public knowledge? Surprise!
Not really. Like Charles Foster Kane's sled and Luke Skywalker's dad, this one is now consigned to the ages. "Did you know...?" Well, as a matter of fact, I did. As will the rest of Al Gore's Internet. Google, Twitter and reality TV have taken most of what was left of the mystery out of life. Sad, really, because I was kind of holding out hope that it was Jim Henson, if only to imagine Kermit the Frog taking in the total eclipse of the sun in Nova Scotia.